skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's phrase it another way: Is it good to make decisions about your future while 60% of your brainpower is focused on cleaning dishes?

You'll do both things more efficiently if you give them your all rather than having your attention constantly flit between them. Imagine if, while programming, you had to switch between projects every five minutes. You'd never get anything done! Yet we expect our brains to perform well under the same harsh circumstances.

Of course, if you don't care about what you're doing, it doesn't really hurt to let your mind wander. You'll probably do a sloppy job, but you don't care anyway. But the real payoff to concentrating on something like washing dishes is that your mind gets better at concentrating, so you'll instinctively do it when it really matters. It's like muscle training — you don't want to wait until you need to heft a couch to start doing it.
Mine is the reverse of this idea. I have an hidden field that when you click submit, I fill in with a token via javascript. If the correct token isn't present when submitting, i reject the comment.
I've spent many hours of my life meditating. Looking back now, they were pretty much a waste of time.

My strength of will comes from adversity, not passivity.
Even the social web dates back further than most people think. For instance, Livejournal's been around since back in 1999 complete with friends lists and communities and privacy settings for posts and all sorts of social functionality, some of which the mainstream social networking sites didn't even adopt until recently.
Gaming hackathon in San Francisco this Saturday
Lots of old people. Though that might just be down to the decrease in witch burnings as a method of driving out plague. Hard to tell for sure unless we count them, but there does seem to be loads of them about.
Extremetech is making me wish for a kill list on HN.
Ask HN: What is your favorite documentation website?
What are some examples of the best documentation you have used, especially on the web? Based on both the content of the documentation, as well as the UI/UX to actually read it.

I'm interested to see what other developers think makes for good documentation.
FTC moving closer to Google antitrust case
If the key is distributed in the app, it is already public and certainly cannot be secret.
Abc Conjecture
In-house the game is to be as stealth as possible while doing any kind of chore. Ninja mode, or 'do not wake women at night' mode. Just moving a cup (even worse, a metallic object) from A to B becomes a challenge, but when you drop the cup on the table without any sound you feel like a magician.
Hey Max - we'd love to meet you guys in person and have you check out our sweet office and awesome company (ReTargeter). How about Friday the 26th?
>But that doesn't mean it won't provide a useful basis for comparison!

Why bother? There are plenty of people out there who've been drinking coke for decades. All you need to do is compare their dental health to people who don't.
Malware Posing As Skype Password Change Notification
> it is statusism

That's not actually a word. It seems probable you meant classism or something similar.
QuickChecking C++ Code
The book "The Lean Startup" defines what a startup is. No need for further explanations. Go and read the book if you have not. Save yourself time and money with it.
p>0.05 does not mean that a correlation has been disproven, just that the authors are unable to reject the null hypothesis (potentially due to lack of statistical power).
Apperian launches first administrative remote control solution for iOS
Last time I checked, Solr and Nutch (the web crawler) had a really bad documentation. Only some wiki pages slapped together, mostly outdated.

Any improvements on this front?
Excellent post complimenting:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11227809/why-is-processin...

Which has been posted many times before - however, applying it to bubble sort, which we all know well, is really interesting.

Thanks for sharing!
Show HN: Piki, a fresh take on the wiki
Or in the UK's sunday sport: "MOON BUS FELL ON SPACE DENTIST"
How do they do that technically? Seems impossible to pull of without jailbreak but they say it's for all iOS devices..

Edit: My wild guess - they use createScreenIOSurface to capture the screen, GSEvents to simulate Input + VOIP Api for staying in the background. Since they are just enterprise distrubuted they can use the hell out of the private API's
All cleaning can be a meditative action - I find cleaning very cathartic.
This might sound weird, but test yourself in the morning. Do you wake up ready to get to work? Or does the thought of it keep you in bed for another hour after the initial alarm goes off? Seriously, that is how I know I like what I am doing. Do keep in mind that there are always the bad days, so do several self 'tests'.

For me, personally, the lack of learning or something challenging would be the deal breaker.

PS -
And since you are near/in SF, take another posters advice and do some hiking in desolation wilderness near Tahoe's south shore. Mt. Tallac makes a great day trip and it's easy to get to with a fantastic view. (Contrary to the name, it is beautiful.)
Yes; as seen in the first footnote:

Contributors GCSS had the original idea. JPP tried to talk him out of it. JPP did the first literature search but GCSS lost it. GCSS drafted the manuscript but JPP deleted all the best jokes. GCSS is the guarantor, and JPP says it serves him right.
Notre Dame researcher helps make Sudoku puzzles less puzzling
FullContact will be at Defrag, we could probably finagle something if you wanted to visit. :)
Not really the "first" as there have been VNC servers[1] available for quite some time now.

[1] http://gitweb.saurik.com/veency.git
I want this as a live-tile background for my phone. Beautiful
Interesting.. how many moving parts does consciousness have? To me, consciousness and the mind are but one thing.
My theory about bubble sort is that a lot of people remembers it just because the name is so damn cute. You can't say bubble without smiling. So I say that we should rename quick sort to something a bit nicer, something first year comp sci students can remember instead of bubble sort. And, for good measure, bubble sort should be "terrible sort" or something like that.
The phrase "stored in plain text" does not mean anything near the same thing as "encrypted with AES in the Windows Vault using the Data Protection API". This story is complete hogwash.
Honestly, bubble sort isn't that bad.

Couple years ago I had a fairly simple program which collected some data into a linked list and displayed it at the end. It took about 2 seconds to load and process the data from disk. I realized it might be neat to optionally sort the output. Since I didn't feel like doing serious work, I just added a bubble sort to my linked list which took a comparison function and then bubble-sorted by pointer swapping.

Guess what time it added? less than a 10th of a second. Completely negligible. It saved me a few hours (as writing bubble sort for a linked list takes maybe 5 minutes and has no chance of complicated bugs) and I doubt anyone will ever notice any slowdown.

So what's the lesson? Little performance tweaks hardly matter in the average program nowadays because everything's disk or network bound (IO bound). For the average program it's not worth writing more complex code that will be quicker (once you fix the hard-to-see bugs) until you actually know the slowness is an issue.
Personally, I find Stripe's documentation to be excellent. It's clear, concise, and a good balance between narrative guides and comprehensive reference material:

https://stripe.com/docs
I dont seem to have privileges to flag news items.
An introduction to Webhooks
Startups as fast-growing companies take a very particular role in history, in economy and in a nation. This is a deep concept with a lot of ramifications and implications. Of course this is intrinsically linked to the concept of innovation and then new ideas but that sort of ideas and innovations which cause all the implication of fast-growing companies. This kind of companies are noteworthy in many scales since millennia.

For example, startups renew dying jobs, notably, at the nation scale.
You seem to be responding to me as if I'm comparing airliners to other forms of transportation. I'm not. I'm comparing current airliners with imaginary ones that are more efficient. The article claims that we've basically hit the physical limit for airliner efficiency, while I maintain that this is nonsense, and while we may have hit a limit for efficiency while maintaining all of the other attributes we want, we certainly haven't hit the limit of efficiency period.

For example, an airplane with a 40:1 L/D (done in the 70s, easy today) able to carry half its empty weight in payload (nothing too hard there) will require about 0.3kWh/mile per ton of payload to maintain level flight. Even accounting for propulsion inefficiencies, that's way more efficient than the 747.

Why don't we have such airplanes? Not because it's somehow physically impossible, nor even technologically impossible, but simply because it's not worth the tradeoffs. Nobody cares about increasing the efficiency of air travel if the result is an airplane that's ten times slower than a modern airliner.

Can we build a more efficient airliner? Of course! To say "no" is to imply that modern airliners are optimized for efficiency above all other things, which is pretty much ridiculous on its face. Can we build a more efficient airliner while still keeping all the other stuff we want out of airliners, like a mach 0.8 cruising speed and global range? Well, that's a bit harder.
Eh. It depends upon the audience of your web site. If it's web site with a programmer audience, there is probably going to be a non-trivial portion of your users that are using plugins like vimperator or vimium.
Awesome company, and awesome dude, I'll attest.

Hey Brian!
First, I'm sure you know better than me about the deep technical issues, given you make UIKit. I also really appreciate that you are on this forum, talking about it!

That said, I have three points:

1) I would never start thinking about making a UI element by thinking about performance. I would build to my functional requirements, and then optimize if necessary.

2) I use this class that draws a button programatically, and I use it inside a UITableView, on a screen that auto-rotates. I have never had an issue, and I developed this code for early iPhones, in 2010. Can you comment on my code in particular, which uses a CAGradientLayer? I have never noticed any issues with this code in practice.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/5w938hx7ittzhc2/TripComputerButton...

3) I never thought about generating UIImages of various colors at runtime - that does sound like a cool technique. It would be nice if stylish butons were built into UIKit - that would have saved me fumbling early on.
It might be worth recalibrating your screen. This page ff. is a good start: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php
If you want to learn C http://www.ioccc.org/ gives some nice examples.

If, on the other hand, you want to learn programming in C, do not use IOCCC sources as something to aim for :-). I haven't read any of it, but I suspect http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2011/xv6.html will contain a wide complexity range of code.
I've asked this as an interview question in the past. It's a great question as it has so many layers. Very few folks ever groked the role the branch predictor plays, but those who did have always gone on to do well.
This shows how bogus it is - you can put lots of sugar in a basic drink and it would score well.

The key point for me is why is concentration of sugar in mg/cl? Why not mg/l, or g/l, or oz/gallon? Each one would give a different answer, and all are equally justifiable. (There is also the weird idea that a decrease in pH of 1, which is 10 times the concentration of H+, would therefore be 10 times as bad.)
Placebo effect has no meaning in this context. Placebo effects are caused by mind rather than a substance. In this case, the entire treatment is in the mind.

There are many, many, many studies on the benefits and effects of meditation. If you haven't found any, it's because you are not looking.
Looks cool, but also looks just like it's aspiring to be Android Bootstrap which already exists. I don't use either, because application setup isn't really the big pain point of Android development. I'd love to see this effort being focused on something with more value, but I applaud the effort regardless.

Edit:

I judged too quickly, and this is really cool. I did a quick setup from both Android Bootstrap and Android KickstartR. Android KickstartR worked with very minimal effort, and while there were a few things I had to do manually in Eclipse because of some weirdness in the latest Android toolkit (set JDK compiler to 1.6 to fix attribute errors, rename the projects...the usual), it worked and it wasn't so think with someone else's coding and project setup style that I could easily get cranking on this. When I set up from Android Bootstrap, it flat out didn't work with a simple Import from Eclipse and when I browsed through the source files, it looks really thick with boiler plate code. Bootstrap looked more like an app in a box and less like an actual bootstrap or kick start for my own app.

This KickstartR thing can go a long way actually if it maintains the lightweight feel. I don't like that AB uses Roboguice for that reason (as an example of what I mean about lightweight vs heavy-handed in this case). The second you introduce that by default, as seems to be the case in AB, you're now tied to that whether you like it or not. I personally gave Roboguice a try and just didn't think it added value for me and wasn't my style. I have other ways of achieving the same benefits that fit my style better, so I'd rather not have it, or at least have the option to remove it.

Something cool for this KickstartR would be to support arbitrary libs and not just the really popular ones. For example, I published my own lib which currently only I'm using AFAIK. But regardless, I use this lib in all of my own work. It would be nice to add a reference from that here, especially since I publish a jar with my library so it would be as easy as copying my jar into the libs directory. A former coworker of mine did the same, and I'd love to grab his libs in the process as well (as well as things like http-request, etc).

Sorry about the quick judgment...nice work.
PG is at least as much of an authority on the topic of startups as Eric Ries so I think that's a bit simplistic.

I personally prefer the definition that Steve Blank offers: "a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model". This to me makes it clear where you should focus. Once you have discovered this model, your startup turns into a "regular" company and your priorities turn to operations and scaling.
Well sure, but who writes their own sorting algorithms these days anyways? It's important to understand the characteristics of various sorting algorithms so you can choose the best one, but that "best one" is almost always going to be implemented by some standard library.

It makes sense to use the most optimal version out of the gate in these cases.
Peaking at #3: "Screencast: Learn Go by Implementing Google's Game of Life."

And from the 2010 archives: "Conway's Game of Life is a Monad."
I'd imagine it's the very first standard algorithm most people learned as part of their CS education as well. It's easy to implement, easy to understand, and lays the basis for the more complex sorters coming later...
This seems like a nice addition. I would love to see conditional writes eventually as well. I wonder if cassandra ends up evolving into something that looks kind of like a database. It's definitely taken some steps in that direction before this. I haven't read the paper yet, but Google's spanner gives me hope that at some point in the near? future I won't have to worry about the details of consistency myself anymore.
I think you're right about the name! Some people have really thought about its apparent enduring popularity, e.g.
Astrachan's old paper:

http://cs.stmarys.ca/~muir/csci4452_11/ClassNotes/Astrachan_...
'Nothing great was ever not shipped."
where do i sign up to invest?
Awesome, this was the first bit of real research I was involved in. Thanks for putting it in blog form Nick, a great addition to HN.
In a language like PHP where you can't easily always easily refactor direct setting of properties (as opposed to Ruby), it makes sense to make anything where the logic might change in the future into a setter. For simple struct-like objects with no calculation, direct setting is fine.

(I know this isn't strictly true about PHP with `__set()` and `__get()`, but that is hardly ideal.)
I was more reminded of this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inR02pEesCQ
Why wait for the dishes? The beauty of mindfulness can manifest itself wonderfully in office work. Shut out the distractions from your mind; then the clack of the keyboard, the feel of your desk, and the flow of code, can fill your senses as well.
1) Any comparison-based sorting algorithm that isn't branchless will mis-predict often.

2) The article completely ignores the possibility of conditional-move instructions, which would cut the mis-predicted branches in this case to zero (or one if we add the "are we done?" check and always predict "no").
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (a non-invasive type of stimulation, in contrast to DBS) is cleared as a second-line (so, after one type of meds fails) treatment for depression.

http://www.neuronetics.com/products-services/system/

If we can find a way to get costs down we absolutely will make medical devices a first-line treatment for mood disorders. There's so much more potential for being specific and preventing the side effects associated with common SSRI anti-depressants such as Prozac.

(I'm a neuro-focused biomedical engineer and have worked on both spinal cord stimulation and deep brain stimulation devices)
You might want to look at project honeypot (https://www.projecthoneypot.org/)

They are an open and distributed service that uses various signatures (ip, tar pits, etc) to block spammers and bots on your site.

I put it up on one of my sites and saw an immediate drop to almost nil. I went from 100+ spammy messages a day to less than 20 in the last 3 months.
PH7 embedded engine: Run PHP programs from your C/C++ application
Startup = a business = an organization that swaps value for money.
Ummm email money transfer cameron@kera.io? =)
Picking on AMD is just weak. You have to realize that Intel is 55 times larger than AMD (market capitalization). It's actually amazing that AMD can compete with them and keep Intel's prices (relatively) low.
Bash One-Liners Explained, Part IV
I'm not a big fan of having a bunch of handholding examples in a blog or something similar. I remember Spotify's setup being pretty decent as far as application related documentation.

https://github.com/spotify/apps-tutorial

If it's something OSS I'm good with a github with the code up, maybe a couple of examples that are well commented and easy to get up and running within the framework, and a reasonable README to guide me through the process.

I'm already experienced with writing software, so if I have something to play with and read through in a text editor I can learn what's going on faster than reading about how to set hello world up for a new framework.
I use fishing for the same purposes. Helps me concentrate on just that activity and get my mind off work-related stuff. Every time after a fishing trip I feel really rested, although might be tired a bit physically.
One gripe: The OP goes on about how energy required goes up with the cube of speed, but that's only true if the flights you're comparing take the same amount of time.

Common sense says you should compare two flights covering the same distance. The flight that's twice as fast takes half as long, so you end up with the energy required being proportional to the square of velocity.

(The power required is still proportional to the cube of speed, which is why e.g. a Bugatti Veyron costs so much.)
Lessons Learned Being an Indie Designer
It can differentiate that, Apple just chose not to push the GM to devices running the Beta.
> The misconception about meditation is that it requires one to give up everything and sit silently. This is not true in its entirety as it depends on how one interprets the word "meditation".

That's right. There are prayer or mantra techniques that could be practiced anywhere, any time. In the Indian culture, there are people who say their mantra (sometimes silently, with no external sound or movement of the tongue) when they go about their daily business. In Orthodox cultures in Eastern Europe, there are people saying the Prayer of the Heart, again, during their daily routine (often silently, without any external sign of the practice).

There are also techniques of focusing your mind on various psycho-physiological aspects (breathing, various "energy centers", etc), but those may be a little harder to do while engaged in your normal routine.

There are also ways of maintaining a meditation-like, or "prayerful", state of mind and feeling during normal activities. This may require some prior experience.

In any case, yes, meditation does not mandate sitting down either on a chair or cross-legged, with eyes closed. Some techniques may actually require that posture, but others don't. It depends.
How do you know that resisting distraction while meditating makes it easier for you to resist urges otherwise? Maybe we actually have a finite store of urge-resistance to go through each day, and spending it on meditation actually makes things worse.

I'm not saying that's true, but I think GP's point is that we should really have some kind of evidence that meditation helps with this, rather than simply assuming that it helps because it makes you practice it.
So the internet should just be a simplified app store and hypervisor/VM?

I like the text based internet! The fact that I can go to a website, right click and view source is the greatest part of the internet!
Well to be honest we were building our marketing website and realized that we were better off to just put it in a Google Doc since we can iterate faster on it. We literally update it in realtime while users watch which is a lot better than the marketing site refine/deploy process. Once things stabilize a little more we'll extract the information into a great marketing website. Probably in the next 6 weeks.
> I'm really curious if github's culture is the cause of their success or a result of it.

If I had to bet on one of those choices, I'd say the culture is the cause, not the result. But, if I had another choice, I'd say probably neither. Because "success" is a complex formula containing many components, one of which is no doubt culture.

Github has an awesome culture because they want to have an awesome culture. It is not the cause nor the result of their success. I think the core value from which all other things stem is simply, to build. IMO that's a value, more than a characteristic, of their culture.

The fact that their company is also successful was no doubt helped by these things (and certainly validates their approach to running a company), but, as Holman hints at in the slides, there is no recipe for building great products -- your best bet is to just build, and keep building.
Motorcycle tours
EagleRider is the largest motorcycle rental and tour company worldwide. We rent all types of motorcycles while offering both self-drive and guided motorcycle tours.
Regarding the TripComputerButton, I'm a little surprised that this is performant in a table view! I'm guessing your buttons are fairly small (< 100x100)?
My first company (post-mortem)